Today, ESA’s Solar Orbiter Photographs the Sun from its Closest Distance

ANTRACELLA — The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter spacecraft made its closest trip to the sun on Saturday, March 26, 2022, passing about a third of the sun-Earth distance. Scientists expect several new record-breaking images to follow from the spacecraft soon.

The audacious European mission (with contributions from NASA), will see the sun from just 30 million miles (48.3 million km) on Saturday morning at 7:50 a.m. EDT. Doing so, Solar Orbiter is set to break the previous record for the closest image of the sun ever taken.

Meanwhile, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe dives tens of millions of km closer to the sun’s surface. In fact, by 2025, Parker Solar will touch the Sun at a distance of only 6 million kilometers. However, the environment it was in was so hot that it was impossible to bring the camera to face the sun. Therefore, the work of a close-up solar photographer can only be done by ESA’s Solar Orbiter.

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On Thursday, March 24, the ESA released images taken by the spacecraft two weeks earlier. At that time, the Solar Orbiter was exactly half the distance between the sun and Earth, (47.8 million miles or 77 million km). It is heading towards its closest point in its elliptical orbit around the star, perihelion.

Since the launch of Solar Orbiter in February 2020, the ground control team has gradually tightened the orbit of the spacecraft around the sun. Because of this, the previous closest approach occurred farther from the sun, about half the sun-Earth distance. Perihelion going forward will see the Solar Orbiter dive a little closer, up to 26 million miles (42 million km) away from the sun’s surface.

Ten Solar Orbiter instruments used approaches on Saturday to take a series of detailed images of the sun’s atmosphere. They also measured the magnetic field as well as the solar wind emitted by the star as it hit the spacecraft.

Scientists can’t wait for the results. They really want to see the data. Images taken during Solar Orbiter’s first approach to the sun in June 2020 reveal tiny bursts of flames dubbed bonfires, a never-before-seen image.

“The bonfires are tiny versions of solar flares that we can observe from Earth, (bonfires) millions or billions of times smaller (than flares),” said David Berghmans, space physicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. He is also the principal investigator of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager instrument.

Berghmans noted that the sun, in the quiet period of its 11-year cycle of activity, has more energy than it seems. “The sun may look lonely at first glance,” he said, “but when we look in detail, we can see the mini flare wherever we look.”

The sun is active with a significant increase in activity in recent times. Chances are, the image that Solar Orbiter will send will be a more lively spectacle than the 2020 image.

Source: Space.com

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